Saturday, December 20, 2008

Governor Palin, the Republican candidate for vice president a month or so back has a new issue to deal with. Her preggers daughter's fiance's mother was just arrested on six felony drug charges.

Wow.

I guess Bristol picked herself a real winner of a family. Can you imagine if the Republicans had won? This would have made Billy Carter look like an asset to the White House.

I actually feel a little sorry for her. Not Palin, please. You've been reading my blog, you know how I feel about her.

No, I feel a little sorry for the mother-in-law to be. She is going to get fried. The Governor, if she has any political sense, is going to make sure she gets the book thrown at her. Otherwise, it will look like favoritism.

Wait a minute....Bristol's boyfriend is a hockey player. That makes his mom a hockey mom. Is this what we could have expected from a hockey mom in the White House?

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

I haven't posted in a while. I haven't had the time. Work has been very busy and a member of my wife's family is going through a tough time medically so the extra hours have been hard to come by. I'll be back in a day or so when I'll have some down time.

In the meantime, all I have to say is this:

I don't care if he is a deserving idiot or not, how in the hell did that Iraqi jounalist have time to throw two shoes at the President? I realize they were in a concrete bunker and that everyone had probably been strip searched, but shouldn't the Secret Service guys be in the actual room with the journalists, not back stage drinking coffee?

This same Secret Service is guarding President-elect Obama. I hope they are doing a better job.

Monday, December 01, 2008

As someone who has lost both friends and family to this terrible disease, I ask that you take a moment and read this article by Dr. Anthony Fauci. He makes some very compelling points about what we need to do as a nation, particularly in the areas of treatment and testing, to combat HIV/AIDS.

As Dr. Fauci points out:

In the United States, more than 1 million people are living with HIV. And 56,000 more people are infected each year in the U.S., driving HIV prevalence rates in some of our communities to levels that rival those seen in sub-Saharan Africa. Gay and bisexual men, and African-Americans in general, are disproportionately affected. The true ground zero of the HIV epidemic in the United States is in those communities.

If this disease was seen as a middle to upper-class white person's disease, would our legislators/policy-makers/health care professionals have been so slow to act?

Regardless, we must remove the barriers to testing and treatment that are helping to feed this plague. Specifically, HIV testing should be a routine part of primary health care -- and primary health care needs to be made available to everyone.

According to Dr. Fauci, more that a fifth of HIV+ people in the U.S. don't know they have the disease. If you accept the conservative estimate of one million Americans being infected with HIV, that means more than 200,000 people are going untreated, uncounseled, and are likely doing things that put others at risk.

Today, I ask you for nothing accept this. Take a quick moment and read Dr. Fauci's short article and think about HIV/AIDS. Just think about it. And the next time you are voting for a candidate, are listening to a debate, or are given the chance to voice an opinion, remember what Dr. Fauci wrote.

We must act, but before action comes thought and debate. And I hope you will join the debate in support of those afflicted with this disease. As much as they need your donations to find a cure, they may just need this country's political will-to-act even more.